


sixteen

by 13letters



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Love Story, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Pain, Pining, Slow Burn, Suffering, happiness, moving back home
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-22
Updated: 2019-04-25
Packaged: 2019-10-14 18:02:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,402
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17513321
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/13letters/pseuds/13letters
Summary: "I thought you'd have been there," she tells him, words muffled around her half of their shared grilled cheese."I told you, I meant to come," he placates, and just like they're perpetually smitten teenagers like no time has passed, she is teasing and accusatory and goading and smirking around her waxy red lipstick, the stain it's pressed into the straw of their shared cherry Coke.He is obtuse and gruff and elusive as a sense of preservation; he is thick skin and thinking of sixteen and her name tattooed on his arm, and he may still be in love with her, he thinks. He thinks,fuck, what happened, and what's left?But idly, as if she's over it, really -- she isfine--She asks him, "Did you mean that you meant to come to my wedding or to his funeral," like she's cutting him, and he stands so quickly that the plate of onion rings falls down. "Gendry.""I'll get you another.""You don't have to," she says, but there's an ice to her eyes that he thought he detected as sadness when she walked in. There's a cruelty, and he reminds himself that it's only been two months since he died.("Did you hear?" Sansa had asked him, hushed over the phone line.)





	1. one

**Author's Note:**

> Happy January, sunbeams! This first chapter is a bit rough, but I'm hopeful there's a happy ending in store. Enjoy, and take heart!

"I thought you'd have been there," she tells him, words muffled around her half of their shared grilled cheese. 

"I told you, I meant to come," he placates, and just like they're perpetually smitten teenagers like no time has passed, she is teasing and accusatory and goading and smirking around her waxy red lipstick, the stain it's pressed into the straw of their shared cherry Coke.

He is obtuse and gruff and elusive as a sense of preservation; he is thick skin and thinking of sixteen and her name tattooed on his arm, and he may still be in love with her, he thinks. He thinks,  _fuck, what happened, and what's left?_ But idly, as if she's over it, really -- she is  _fine_ \-- 

She asks him, "Did you mean that you meant to come to my wedding or to his funeral," like she's cutting him, and he stands so quickly that the plate of onion rings falls down. "Gendry."

"I'll get you another."

"You don't have to," she says, but there's an ice to her eyes that he thought he detected as sadness when she walked in. There's a cruelty, and he reminds himself that it's only been two months since he died.

("Did you hear?" Sansa had asked him, hushed over the phone line.)

"Listen," he says. He's never been good with words, but really, there's nothing to say except  _sorry; I never meant_ \-- "I need to get to work."

"Of course."

"Can I give you a ride anywhere?" It's a last-ditch apology to make amends. It's a lot like how she first walked into this diner and into him like she finally felt home amidst her mother's petting and her father's stern-faced worry and Robb's brave support and Jon's sweet doting and Sansa's sympathetic hugging and Rickon's sarcastic, quiet humor:  _Yeah. I mean, that's unfortunate_. "I'll live," she told him, to be brave.  _Yeah, that's what Ned thought, too._

"Robb's coming for me."

"All right."

"Drive safely," Arya says to him, and hell. 

He leaves and hates himself. She goes into the bathroom and cries and only comes out when Robb texts, calls, then FaceTimes her from outside the door, "Sunshine," he calls her, "sweet girl, darling, _no_. Come out when you're ready, Arya. I'll take you home, sunshine. Dry your eyes now. Tears won't bring him back. Come on, Arya, let's go home."

 

.

 

She married Ned Dayne sixteen months before he was killed by a drunk driver. 

"Isn't it weird," Sansa had asked into her laptop screen, all feet and long red hair as she painted her toenails, "that he shares a name with Dad?"

"I don't call him  _Ned_ ," Arya dismissed. God, her hair was in the braid he pleated it into, and her throat was a necklace of his teeth, a night gone so well -- all  _The Lord of the Rings_ films. "I call him  _babe_. I call him  _handsome_."

"What's he call you, then?"

"He calls me a goddess," she actually laughed, giggled in this bright, bursting way, radiating a happiness that Sansa hadn't seen in almost a year, hadn't seen since she told Arya that she was going on a date with Gendry.

They lived in an apartment that Arya couldn't afford now that she was alone, so because her master's in maths is online, because really, all they owned together could fit into three tiny boxes, she moves back home to be with her mom and her dad and Rickon, the others that are no more than a city away, thirty-odd minutes with embraces in their voices that extend and trespass upon texts and video calls and e-mails.

They had met and first began to see each other inside their campus library. It was perfect until it wasn't, until Arya finds her wedding dress in her childhood bedroom and has to put it on and remember and  _remember_ and hate him for leaving that night, oh, God. She was  _screaming_ when Rickon found her, when sixteen years old, skipping high school, in his dad's old Van Halen t-shirt, he quietly tied up the laces at the back of her gown and told her that she looked pretty, a regular Persephone, "You'll see him again," he murmured for consolation before letting her cry into his chest, and oh, no.

Two months back home, two months as a widow, and she pees on a stick. Eddard drives her to the drug store for the test just like he once had to drive her for her first pack of pads. "You'll be wanting extra-long ones," he said, very casually like he had this knowledge on good authority. "With the wings." Loss has hit both of them. This isn't the first pregnancy test that he's bought her.

She sees Ned everywhere and doesn't know if she's happy or sad when the line shows a negative, a deduction. Another lack of, a loss, an absence, "Baby," Eddard whispers. She had chosen to call him because she knew that no matter what the result was, she wanted him to hold her.

Some nights she wakes up screaming for him, and other nights, she wakes up sobbing. In her dreams, she is eighteen, and loving him is fire. He burns her everywhere that she touches him, and what she wouldn't give to be that reckless and that uninhibited again. Some nights, she's twenty-one and a newlywed, and their date night is a walk to the cornerstore where they share a bottle of cherry Coke and a Snickers bar. It's humid and muggy and their hands are sticky but fit in each other's perfectly, always have, and it something else entirely to be loved than it is to love. He says to her, "Let's have a baby," and she wakes up and runs to the toilet. She goes back to bed and doesn't wake up for thirty-three hours.

Cat is humming softly at her bedside when she finally summons enough energy to open her eyes, and Arya quietly begins to cry when her mother begins to brush and braid her hair.

 

.

 

"You could have come to the funeral," Robb says to Gendry. Just like that, they are both fourteen. They are both simultaneously too young and too old for this conversation.

"I did," is all Gendry can manage. It's beginning to rain outside the diner, and when he looks through the windows, Arya's gone from their table.

"I didn't see you."

"I stood near the back."

"You could have offered your condolences."

"I'm sorry," Gendry says like iron.

Honestly, he isn't sure why he's angry. He just is. 


	2. two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Gendry doesn't look up, just starts making the cranberry soda in silence save for Tom Waits over the speakers. First his sister and now his cousin, when a Stark decides to marry a Baratheon, they do, and it's been forty-three days without her here.

"'And so we beat on,'" Robb reads to her, "'boats against the current.'"

It is August, and Arya is thirteen. She is thirteen, and cradle-to-grave, the third pair of hands that ever held her, Robb is her best friend in the entire world.

He's leaving bright and early tomorrow morning after the Stark tradition of breakfast in the diner,  _that_ diner that she'll have her first kiss outside of in a few years, will cry inside after a couple more, and she hates him for leaving her; really, she does. But he is eighteen with auburn hair and almost the bluest eyes she's ever seen, and he is warm, nonjudgmental advice, her safe place.

He is 1/3 of the three musketeers and also the gypsy to his, Jon's, and Gendry's self-proclaimed group chat,  _Gypsy, Tramp, and Thief_. His favorite pop singer has always been Cher -- Christ, this boy really does believe in life after love, and that is why there is pink lipstick imprinted into this copy of  _The Great Gatsby_ , Myrcella's favorite book, Robb's present from this Christmas past, a heart drawn onto the back of his hand, a promise ring in the form of a love note he wrote to her and slipped into her pink backpack when he was eight,  _We're gonna get married one day_ ; yes, they are. Just, college first, together.

Robb is studying literature, will teach one day at _Oggsford, old sport_ , and hopes to become a medievalist. He's read most of Ovid, so God, help him. Chivalry isn't dead to Robb; to Robb, this front porch is his entire world, so sitting here with his favorite sibling tonight, this is magic. 

"Shall we read the last of it together?" he asks her. The fireflies are just beginning to come out. The sun is a dream beyond all these trees, and the sky is his favorite shade of pink. "Or shall we wait?"

Really, it's now or never. 

"Let's wait for Thanksgiving," she tells him. 

"Christmas," he apologizes, so sorry already, just feeling this fight in her before it's already begun. "Arya, I won't be home until Christmas."

 

.

 

Sansa speaks French fluently and with her tongue.

If you'd ask her now, none of her boyfriends ever mattered; they were each inconsequential and only contributed to one silver lining, one small ray of optimism in a life nearly committed to always, _always_ the bridesmaid and a one-way ticket to Spinster Island: one day, _one day_ , there would be a man unafraid to love her.

On the last day of the single week of spring break she spends in France, she's handed a portfolio of art work, water colors, sketches, and photographs, Polaroids and sepia-colored, brightly saturated glimpses of her in the monochrome, Kodachrome, and technicolor. There is her outside a bakery, inside a Cathedral, crying, in a garden, in front of the Eiffel Tower, leaving a perfume shop.

"I know how this must look," he's so quick to apologize, regal, finely-chiseled, and in the ugliest sweater she's ever seen, "Pardon, mademoiselle, je con--"

"No," she says. Partially because she isn't fluent in French yet, nor is she fluent in French kissing. But Willas -- _Will_. Christ, Will. Soon.

They are strangers, but he's seen her with roses in her hair, with her tears caught in candlelight, Hail Mary. "How must this look, sir?" she asks him. Her voice is as hard, as clearly immaculate as her manicure, and she's as confident as a woman who's taken boxing classes for the last three years.

"You were everywhere I was," he apologizes. Quite suddenly, it's easier to look at the impressions of her he's made rather than her in front of him, maybe an inch taller than him, maybe two, actually almost devastating to behold; he didn't get the lines of her nose right, he sees now. If he'd just gotten closer -- Chanel 5. Oh, help. "I couldn't _not_ see you, miss."

"You could have not violated my privacy," she counters, but oh, how this man begins to tinge pink.

"I could have, indeed, perhaps," he says. And with helpless, infatuated dread, this parcel of her visage wrapped in twine, enough self-awareness to know Marge is going to wake up the whole of Cambridge laughing at him when he tells her what he had the audacity to speak next, out loud, in this frigid Parisian air, "But could Jesus help but marry Magdalene?"

"Excuse me?"

Each piece is appropriately titled either _Venus, Aphrodite, Helen, Guinevere,_ or _Beauty,_ simply. She didn't intend to spend the entirety of her flight home e-mailing Will who teaches history at Oxford, who has degrees in history, literature, and art, who attended a year of seminary, who also spent a year in the Peace Corps., who is 31, single, and of the Tyrell bloodline that may date back to the Plantagenets, but she did.

"I'm going to marry him," she says to Bran. "Like, tomorrow. I'm going to marry him. You're all invited."

"Sansa," chides Cat. "You met him two days ago. At least wait a week."

"Mama," Sansa huffs. Letting the picture of Willas on her phone speak for her (her mouth's too full of Captain Crunch, her heart too light), she sorta just thrusts her phone at her mother. "Look at 'im. Look at this man. He's Adonis. He's Achilles. He's -- I don't know, Robinson Crusoe, Phoebus, Prince Phillip. He's _perfect_."

That is when Rickon comes in with the mail, though, with a save-the-date from Arya and a letter from Jon, from Guam.

"A year from tomorrow," he tells them, stifling his laugh until he's sure no one will scream or spill the milk. She's gonna marry this kid a year from tomorrow. Can you believe it?"

"Not a year," says Sansa. "Literally tomorrow."

"He's hardly a child," disagrees Cat, squinting at Sansa's phone, all bifocal focus. "He's a man."

"Mrs. Stark," murmurs Ned, half-surprised.

"The most perfect man. And he's so kind and sweet, too. His manners are impeccable."

"Not you," interrupts Rick, and he's fourteen and beaten up Converse, six-foot-even already. He stretches onto the kitchen island easily, takes his big sister's spoon since she's gone rigid. "Arya. She's marrying Ned a year from tomorrow. Look at this."

 

.

 

Bran.

There's always been a hole in the Stark home. Any of them will say as much.

His little boy bones were broken like a bird's.

 

.

 

Rickon's story is Robb's; he's so like him at fourteen, sixteen, bright auburn hair, the bluest eyes in the world -- "Do what I did," Robb suggests when Rick brings to him this predicament, this completely awful, totally ridiculous and unnecessary and simultaneously unforeseen event that is his heart given way and eternally undone with love. "Just propose to her. Say it: _Will you marry me?_ Simple and effective. Who's the girl?"

"She isn't a girl," says Rick. When he stresses his hands through his hair like that, he is so like Robb. Just, he won't quit growing. Fifteen, and he's six-two; sixteen, and he's six-three, and he's in love with Shireen. Twenty-one, and he'll have been six-five for the last three years; he'll have been secretly wed to Shireen for the last three months, but fourteen, and to him, she's beautiful. "She's a goddess."

He's with her in English and in Algebra, and she honestly must think he's the stupidest boy to ever live. Everyday he asks her, "I don't understand what Juliet is saying to Romeo. Explain it to me?" Or some variant of, "I don't remember what the cosign is. Can you help?"

When Arya leaves for college, she apologizes to Robb as soon as she quits crying. If she'd realized she was making it so hard for him to go, that she was making him feel so guilty for wanting to go, she wouldn't have shouted after him like Rickon had screamed for her, alone and accusing and angry.

Fourteen, and for his first date with her, he doesn't ask Robb for help the day of; he doesn't ask his father. He rides his bike to the Dusty Ladder, and the second he's called _sugar_ by a serving girl, he goes bright red and pulls at the straps of his backpack. He walks the dusty tables of the day drinkers until he's at the barstools in front of Gendry's biceps (white t-shirt, tight sleeves, holes by the neck -- Arya's nails -- he knows from reading her diary) and the stacks of clean and used glasses.

Gendry doesn't look up, just starts making the cranberry soda in silence save for Tom Waits over the speakers. First his sister and now his cousin, when a Stark decides to marry a Baratheon, they do, and it's been forty-three days without her here. Phones work both ways. Every time he doesn't call her, he almost does -- did. Twenty-eight days ago, he tossed his phone into the lake and put out a cigarette, which: "I tried to call you," Rick says, pointedly.

The baby of the family, he's used to being left and then ignored, so this bait, this guilt trip, is almost as effective as the sight of the t-shirt he's wearing. It's Robb's from ages ago, and it's the both of them at fourteen and best friends, brothers, and basketball players. A training camp tee in muted green, memories of sweat and sun.

 

.

 

"I'm just saying," Sam just says, "you could come over whenever you want, y'know. You could spend the night, too, and we could play _Resident Evil_ or watch all the _Pirates_ movies or build with my _Star Wars_ Legos."

"Thank you," Jon says, 'cause even if he's a bit too proud to say it, Cat treated Sam as a son when Jon invited him over after school, but she behaved just as coldly to him as ever. Mrs. Tarly, though, bakes cookies with cinnamon in them and chocolate cakes with vegetables puréed inside it and pizza rolls and fruit salad. She asks both her sons about their day and genuinely listens to their answers and teaches Sam how to play chess and sew on shirt buttons and encourages him in each pursuit he takes up to appease his father.

She stayed at his hospital bedside each hour he spent recovering from his broken leg when a hiking trip with Mr. Tarly and Dickon went wrong. She loves her son, and she adores all of his friends, and while the Stark house is a home to him without Catelyn in it, the Tarly house is a home to Sam when his father isn't in it.

On alternate afternoons, they each gain the parent they had been previously lacking. Jon takes Sam up on his offer, and that's how he comes to be laying on the living room floor in exhaustion.

He asked Sam if he could invite Gendry over, too, so Cat wouldn't glare at him for being born as a similar slight against her, but of course, Gendry had to bring Robb. Where one went, so came the other (they were inseparable, then), and Sam has three friends instead of one. His father knows he has real friends, too, and he was proud until he caught them playing an old-school PS2 version of Dance Dance Revolution. Jesus.

Enter: teenage boy exhaustion, Gendry and Robb on the love-seat, Sam and Jon on the plush, soft carpet.

"I don't think I did it right, though," Robb is saying, perplexed blue eyes and Gendry's feet on his thigh. "I sweat _so_ much." "

All you did was kiss, right?" Sam asks, now wondering if he's got the anatomical aspects correct.

"Yeah," he flushes, not looking at anyone. "It was.. messy. There was a lot of spit."

"It gets easier," says Dickon, coming into the living room a bit like an intruder, like he's got some burden to carry, too. "After the first time, it's better."

"We have chips," Sam offers him, and his brother smiles, sits on the floor by the coffee table.

"I asked Mom to bring out ice cream."

"Can I ask a question?" begins Jon, slowly. "What do you do with your tongue?"

Everybody cracks, white noise and clutched sides.

"Well," Gendry says, quiet over the snickering, the happy laughter, "I won't give too much away, but 'Cella's in love with you."

 

.

 

"Arya."

"Go to hell."

"Arya, I swear to Christ. Get in the car!"

"I'm walking home!" she huffs at him, hollering with a glance back at him that condemns him where he stands in the frigid winter air, completely melts him with her hatred, her fury, her disappointment, because she had taken his beautiful face in her hands.

She had misinterpreted everything about them so exponentially that they've no choice but to factor to zero, now, to reduce to two people who were barely lovers, so hell, why should they remain even friends?

"You'll freeze, Arya! Home's six miles away!"

"I don't care," she says, too quietly for him to hear against the wind.

Seventeen, and she should have known better. She should have fucking known better.

His hands were shaking when he kissed her for the first time. It was quick, and it was dry, cold, and ended before she could remember to breathe or use her tongue or hold onto him. His hands were still shaking when he stood straight, looked down at her with his head tilted and his eyes wondering _Well?_ in deafening silence, in dread, in -- in self-preservation, because the way she was looking up at him, God.

Fuck. "Arya." His voice was too dark, too heavy when he asked, "Is it everything you dreamed of?"

She was silent for long, much longer than their kiss lasted, and she doesn't know why her heart is still beating so hard. There was nothing to get excited about. It was honestly a bit disappointing, and that's what she wanted to tell him, but he was holding onto her shoulders. She wanted to find it sweet, but she bitterly thought that he was holding her at arms length and all of that sweetness, this potential, sours.

"It was nice," she said, stoic.

"Nice," he repeats.

He licked his lip as he looked away, so sensuously that she actually might have cried because _where_ was that twelve seconds before she was kissed for the first time? Her life was the lackluster result of a year of sexual tension and pining and dreaming and his jaw, Christ, his _jaw_ , and she didn't even feel the stubble.

"Yeah. Nice. Thank you."

"You look underwhelmed."

"No," she was so quick to say. So she didn't have to look up at him, she stares at the buttons of his flannel, the burgundy. "Do you remember," she reminded him, quite seriously as his muscles went tense, _I'll kiss you before you die,_ he once promised, "that I told you I would literally die if I wasn't kissed? Well. I should have just died, Gendry."

"Jesus, Arya!"

"I'm sorry," she snapped back in the same tone. "It isn't what I expected. That's all! If that's all kissing is, then what is there to get so heated about? I mean, it was lovely. Chaste. I feel like we should shake hands."

"Arya."

"It isn't what I expected, Gendry."

"Kissing," he asked her, and his voice pitched so low and warm that her eyes began to tear up, "or kissing me?"

"Same difference."

"Do you want to tell me what you expected?"

"No," she glowered, finally pulling herself away from him. "You'll laugh at me. No. Drive me home, now."

"Tell me what you thought it'd be like."

"The movies," she huffed, gesturing too broadly, too exponentially. Her heart might actually break under the weight of what she can't convey; she had dreamed of this for months. "All the movies. I thought I'd be swept off my feet, okay? I thought I'd taste magic. Potential. I thought.."

"Love," he tactlessly interpreted. Then he honest-to-God laughed and leaned against the door of his car. He ran his hands through his hair, and he looked at her like mountains were growing inside his ribs, like something was steadily separating them -- her arms holding herself together because she could sense it, this scorn, this mockery that is the joke that has been her love for him. "Arya, you thought I loved you?"

"Get in the car, kid," he begs, too firm to be sorry, too.. guilty. Maybe that's why it hurts. "Arya. Arya!"

And she's hit by a bike.


	3. snapshot

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> To distract himself -- to distract her -- he takes her palm and gently soothes the scratches with his callused fingertips, follows the lines of her fingers in a way that is almost prophetic. They're nearly holding hands. "Don't say my name like I'm breaking your heart, all right?"

Arya falls in a mess of metal and wheels and another man's limbs. 

She's fine, really, it's just her ankle is caught through the wires of the wheel and the pavement is her skin shorn open to peeled flesh and spots of blood: her palms, her knees, her forearms, gravel under her nails. The man, some poor college kid, is saying _sorry, sorry, sorry_ again and again. 

She wants to tell him it's fine, she's fine (especially her lips; God, his mouth was so _cold_ against hers) with his arms around her back, supporting her, lifting her, oh, no, "Gendry," she half–whines. 

Quite unexpectedly, she begins to cry, and that's what scares him. 

"Gendry?" the bike boy repeats, looking startled in his neon yellow coat. "Thank God, man! Hey. She didn't get out of the way."

"My foot," she says, and it aches -- her eyes are closed, and the way Gendry is leaning over her, oh, with his chest against her back each time he breathes, it -- it could almost be sex. 

It's humiliating. It is her unable to ask for something because she doesn't know how to quantify it: him, _him_ , and she is literally bleeding on the ground. She's genuinely sobbing, because four minutes ago she had never been kissed, and now he is tender hands around her ankle, the frayed hem of her skinny jeans. Love slipping out of her hands.

With only the tiniest pressure, he's snapped the wires. He's saved her shoe, too, and he is murmuring words she can't quite understand: her name, Arya, _baby, you're okay. You're not hurt. Arya._

"Bro, is she good? My bike."

"Shut the fuck up, Greg," Gendry says. 

"Didn't you see me?" he asks both of them, relatively unscathed due to his helmet and Old Navy jeans. "You okay, kid?"

"Don't touch her," Gendry snaps the same instant she weakly cries, "Don't call me that. Gendry, let me die."

"Arya," he actually _laughs_. Relief and his arms on hers to help her stand, the sun coming out from behind the clouds. "Just a few scratches, Arya. You're okay."

"Robb's little sister?" asks Greg. "How's he doing nowadays? I've got Band-Aids in my fanny pack if you need some, Arya."

"Tissues," she says, this choked sob since it hurts to move. She's thankful for the excuse of pain, but these tears -- the tender way with which Gendry wipes her nose with the sleeve of his hoodie -- is slightly pathetic or endearing depending on the vantage point, and he's nine inches taller than her. 

"I don't have tissues," apologizes Greg. 

"She's fine," says Gendry. "Come on," he urges her more gently, "I'll take you to the hospital."

"Are you gonna press charges?"

"Arya, quit crying. It's okay." 

"Is your dad gonna pay to fix my bike, or..?"

"Jesus. Arya, lean onto me."

"No."

"Don't be stubborn," he goads her, and it's only a few more steps to his car. With his arm around her waist, he's practically lifting her. It's too much intimacy after this deprivation, this -- this.

"Don't be mean," she mutters. It hurts, his gentle hands and his firm muscles. _Baby,_ as he helps her into his car. "I can do it," she hurries, as the last thing she wants is his hands over her pelvis to clip the seatbelt securely. His hair a brush against her cheek. 

His hand in hers on the way to the emergency room, her unable to quit crying not because her ankle hurts but because he hurt her, took the knife out of his glove box and stabbed her two times, once for each year she's loved him with her heart gushing red, blood through the holes of her jeans, cracks through her smile and her blue nail polish when he asks her if she's all right, if she wants him to let go of her, no, _hold on._

_Wait._

 

"I'm just going to help you inside, Arya," he tells her, too apologetic. 

"Haven't you done enough?" she tries, accusing and heartbroken because she can still hear it, him breaking her heart,

"Arya."

"No," she says, "no, _Gendry_."

"Don't do that," he dismissively warns her, and for all the fight she took up, she doesn't do anything when he lifts her up and cradles her against his chest, carries her and her sprained ankle into her house, nothing but sigh too softly to be annoyed. "Don't say my name like that."

"Like how?" she mutters, antagonizing him for the hell of it, now, because her hand is too conscious against his chest, against the pulse of his heart. 

"Couch or your room?"

"My room." That he can lift her effortlessly, without thinking about kissing her at all -- Christ. "I don't want you to come in, though."

"I'll set you on the floor," he cracks, taking the stairs slowly. 

"Fine."

"Fine."

"Fine, Gendry. Just throw me onto the ground. Crucify me, Judas. You should have let me bleed out on the sidewalk."

"Jesus," he says, and though his grip tightens around her, it's still heartbreakingly gentle. It's how she realizes he's genuinely angry at her, and she hates that she's misinterpreted his silence because it means he's right, that she's silly and delusional and doesn't know him as well as he likes to think, the blue his eyes get when he's happy, crystal, the way he clutches his ribs when he laughs, like his dad, like joy makes him boneless, that he ran away when he was sixteen and she only knows because she was with Robb in his car when Gendry called him (Would anyone care? _me_ in her still, small voice as every hope she's put on him for years of her love perpetuating fate from happenstance to his scorn and his severity). 

His grin quirks to drawn-out anger and this bemused, fond, yet frustrated sigh, love painted black and purple: the bruise blossoming on her knee. The birthmark he's got beneath his left armpit. "I _told_ you to get into the car. Why didn't you?"

"I didn't want to go anywhere with you."

"You'd already been with me."

"I hadn't," she says in the same tone, but oh, be still, her reverberating, seizing heart. A man, this man, is throwing her down onto a bed, and it isn't lascivious or erotic or seductive. She actually screams, and the mattress dips beneath him when he sits next to her, when so, _so_ languidly, he takes her feet into his lap and strokes her Achilles' tendon with his thumb. 

"You won't ride in my car, but you'll permit my tongue in your mouth."

"You didn't," she says, angry enough to masquerade her hurt, mortification just a bedmate to desire. "Stop that."

"I'm taking off the brace," he says, slow. His voice drops, pitches so low that she feels it in her sternum. 

"You didn't want to kiss me," she contradicts, so biting, "so you shouldn't have. It was rude."

"You asked me to, Arya."

"I didn't think you'd be brave enough to."

"Arya."

"Gendry," she says. 

"Don't," he interrupts her quietly. To distract himself -- to distract her -- he takes her palm and gently soothes the scratches with his callused fingertips, follows the lines of her fingers in a way that is almost prophetic. They're nearly holding hands. "Don't say my name like I'm breaking your heart, all right?"

"Like I'm breathing," she whispers. He is looking at her, but she is staring at their hands. 

"I couldn't," he says. "Breathe," he means; he means, _I'm scared._

_My car is the best place I'll ever have kissed you._

_My ribs are cracking, and it is your name they whisper as they shatter: love. Why did you listen to me,_ "Arya. I couldn't breathe as I kissed you. I'm sorry that you expected more, more than I--"

"So am I," she interrupts, but he begins again, her name, almost frantic in this desperate plea to help her understand that he can't, he really couldn't, "no," she tells him, " _no_ ," love her, he -- 

\-- is broken glass that's dropped from his hand. Pieces of shrapnel on the floor and red wine that's staining the wooden floorboards like blood, like his heart spilled from her hands, now, "No," she tells him, "you don't have to clean that up, Gendry."

"Don't," he tells her, unable to meet her eyes even as she drops to her knees in front of him and begins gathering the shards of glass. A broken stem of a wine glass and her dress, black lace, backless. 

"You'll cut yourself. You'll stain your dress," he says quietly, too angry, too aching when she inevitably hurts herself with this mess they've made at her engagement party. 

"Damn it," she whispers. With a bit of a smile, a wince, she holds up her palm for him to see: bright red blood. "I knew this would happen, Gendry. Didn't you?"

"Arya."

"I'll find Robb to help. We have a first aid kit hidden away somewhere."

"Arya."

"Don't worry about the mess," she tells him. When she stands, he is looking up at her from his knees, and he is so, so undone by her, still. She was always going to kill him. 

"Congratulations," he says to her. Then: "They're waiting," with her blood on the floor. It drips from her palm to her feet.


End file.
